Limiting Factors

When I first learned about Peak Oil 12 years ago, ironically from my wife who'd been sent the link for dieoff.org, I first filled my pantry with food, water, and ammunition, like everybody else. Then I knuckled down and starting learning the details. I got really scared, because Peak Oil is a global problem, with global level megadeaths probable. The oil IS running out. The alternatives aren't enough by themselves. We need everything up and running or we're going to see billions die. That means solar, wind, nuclear, hydro electric, coal, and biofuels, all of them together, just to replace enough to barely run enough of an economy that we won't starve to death. And our economy is largely based on transporting people and goods around, with a side order of big agriculture to feed the world. Without oil to provide the transportation fuel, we need to be looking at bicycles and high efficiency vehicles. That means scooters and electric cars.


The big problem with electric cars is the limiting factors.

• Range, limited by batteries. 
• Cost, mostly in materials and labor. 
• Scale: we need enough to replace ALL cars with electric.
• Grid: we need a better maintained electric grid to recharge all those cars and all the needed electric generating capacity to power that grid at the right times. 
• Time: the electric cars need to be built cheap and fast so all cars are electric BEFORE OPEC pulls the plug in yet another violent Jihad. 

We don't have dense enough batteries available to offer the utility of gasoline. Gasoline is light weight. Once you've made it, its easy to handle and worked at STP, which is fantastic compared to pressurized gases like Hydrogen or Propane or regular Natural Gas. Diesel fuel needs a better engine, but is a bit more energy dense than gasoline, and keeps for years, unlike gasoline which spoils in a few months due to evaporation of critical solvents etc.

Electric cars need electric batteries. The best available use lithium, but there isn't enough. The next best use Nickel, but again there isn't enough. Hydrogen leaks through solid metal, nevermind even more open materials like plastics, so its more of a grenade than a fuel. And it loses energy every step of the way, so you have to make a lot more than you would with a purely electric vehicle.

The ONLY vehicles that scale up have two wheels: basically bicycles and scooters (and motorcycles). They offer the best power to weight ratio, thus the best fuel economy. F = MA is still law.

I learned Welding because I dislike Retail and I like Manufacturing. I've done Manufacturing in several different places, up here being one of the better ones. Up here in the Sierras I helped make soap, bath salts, and lip balm, then packaged them. It was fun. In the Bay Area I made DNA, which was NOT fun. I don't recommend that to anyone but the suicidal. In school I learned to join metals using various welding techniques, which I remain competent doing. Its a great deal of preparation and settings and good eye-hand coordination. However welding is mostly done in China, then shipped here. Machining too. It really sucks to know a trade and not be able to use it, but Free Trade is sort of international for BOHICA.

The only scalable transportation you don't have to pedal and offers you more than 12 miles of range, is the scooter (or motorcycle). There's a very nice thread on ADVRider.com called "What do you love about scooters/scootering?". I think its a good read. People like them because they are slow, because you are part of the world around you, like a bicyclist is, only without the hard breathing so you can actually enjoy it. I like that about them. Scooters are very much unlike electric cars because anybody can have one, for relatively low money, and while its not fun in the rain, you probably won't be kidnapped for riding one, unlike an electric car. Scooters are the future.

Honda SuperCub

If you have the money for an electric car, enjoy till it gets you killed. Otherwise get one of the above Supercubs and don't worry about it. I'd love one. They're really pretty awesome. Simple, easy to operate with one hand and your feet, designed for the real world of bad roads, bad weather, narrow streets, crappy people, endemic poverty. Our future, more or less. Don't you want the Future? Isn't this close enough to your flying car and robot helpers? This and a microwave and a roomba should be good enough, right? And a smartphone, I suppose. That about covers it. Welcome to 2013.